America's Most Inspiring CEOs

A list of people worth emulating. Remember their names.

A list of people worth emulating. Remember their names.

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America's Most Inspiring CEOs

America's Most Inspiring CEOs

Success is often measured using unimaginative metrics when it comes to the American chief executive officer. The bottom line, often in the form of the stock price, is the classic criterion used to pick out the best CEOs — as if that tells you anything real about the human in charge. We chose instead to look at each executive's ability to inspire. Here we honor corporate leaders who believe that by making their employees' working lives better, they can make people feel good about working hard. Not with foosball tables. These CEOs lead by example. They act as they want their workers to act, and they also understand that part of the point of work is someday never to have to work again. They inspire. And, incidentally, their ability to inspire appears to be good for the bottom line.

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Jon Feltheimer, Lionsgate

Jon Feltheimer, Lionsgate

In few businesses is a CEO's success measured with such black-and-white exactitude as it is in Hollywood. That's because (to oversimplify) a movie studio's success is built on the success of its movies, and the decision to green-light filters up to one person. Period. If a movie is a hit, he's a genius. If it flops, he's a moron. When Jon Feltheimer took over Lionsgate, it was an obscure Canadian film-production-and-distribution company. Some good instinct, some good business sense, and 12 years later it's a powerhouse known for taking risks on controversial films. He did it one huge, excruciating decision at a time. A partial scorecard:

BULL'S EYES

Monster's Ball (2001)

"That was one of the first big risks we took. That script had been around forever, and people were nervous about the edgy, interracial love story and a new director."

The result: Best Actress Academy Award for Halle Berry and $31 million in domestic box office.

Precious (2009)

"We were already in business with Tyler Perry, and I really wanted to do this movie. So did Oprah Winfrey. He and I got on the phone with Oprah at 2:00 a.m. one night. I started trying to explain to her why she should do it with us. She said, 'You know, Jon, I'm going to do this movie with whoever gets the rights.' That was pretty clear. I got off the phone and bought the rights immediately. It was a gun-to-the-head moment, and we did what we had to do."

The result: Two Academy Awards and $48 million box office.

The Hunger Games (2009)

"That was a two-part decision. The first was to buy the book at a level that was significantly more than we usually pay for development. I read it in one night, though, and decided that we should go for it. The second part was to green-light the movie at a much higher budget — and risk — than we normally take. Strong presales eventually brought the risk back down to a more comfortable level.

The result: The 12th-highest-grossing movie of all time — $404 million domestic box office — and four films over the next five years.

GOOD SHOTS

Mad Men (2007)

"Just like with Crash, we passed on Mad Men in script form. And so it came back piloted by AMC. I saw the quality of it — the offbeat nature that felt like something network television wouldn't or couldn't do — so we went for it.

The result: Helped establish Lionsgate as a leader in supplying cable programming. Mad Men has won four straight best-drama Emmys.

Twilight (2008)

"We bought Summit Entertainment because it was a good strategic fit, and the opportunity to control two huge young-adult franchises was too good to pass up. Of course, we could have made a deal some years before at a much lower price. This was not my finest moment, but not a bad one in the end."

The result: The market capitalization of Lionsgate increased 70 percent in the six months after the acquisition.

MISS

Warrior (2011)

"I stuck my neck out on Warrior. I liked it so much, but it was a huge disappointment."

The result: An Academy Award nomination for Nick Nolte, but a financial failure.

TO BE DETERMINED

Anger Management (2012)

"This is another of those risky bets we like to take. Pretty much everybody in town said, 'Jon, you're out of your mind.' But we think we're in pretty good shape. We're very pleased with Charlie [Sheen] and the show, but the final word hasn’t been written yet."

America's Most Inspiring CEOs

Success is often measured using unimaginative metrics when it comes to the American chief executive officer. The bottom line, often in the form of the stock price, is the classic criterion used to pick out the best CEOs — as if that tells you anything real about the human in charge. We chose instead to look at each executive's ability to inspire. Here we honor corporate leaders who believe that by making their employees' working lives better, they can make people feel good about working hard. Not with foosball tables. These CEOs lead by example. They act as they want their workers to act, and they also understand that part of the point of work is someday never to have to work again. They inspire. And, incidentally, their ability to inspire appears to be good for the bottom line.

Tetra Images

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Jon Feltheimer, Lionsgate

In few businesses is a CEO's success measured with such black-and-white exactitude as it is in Hollywood. That's because (to oversimplify) a movie studio's success is built on the success of its movies, and the decision to green-light filters up to one person. Period. If a movie is a hit, he's a genius. If it flops, he's a moron. When Jon Feltheimer took over Lionsgate, it was an obscure Canadian film-production-and-distribution company. Some good instinct, some good business sense, and 12 years later it's a powerhouse known for taking risks on controversial films. He did it one huge, excruciating decision at a time. A partial scorecard:

BULL'S EYES

Monster's Ball (2001)

"That was one of the first big risks we took. That script had been around forever, and people were nervous about the edgy, interracial love story and a new director."

The result: Best Actress Academy Award for Halle Berry and $31 million in domestic box office.

Precious (2009)

"We were already in business with Tyler Perry, and I really wanted to do this movie. So did Oprah Winfrey. He and I got on the phone with Oprah at 2:00 a.m. one night. I started trying to explain to her why she should do it with us. She said, 'You know, Jon, I'm going to do this movie with whoever gets the rights.' That was pretty clear. I got off the phone and bought the rights immediately. It was a gun-to-the-head moment, and we did what we had to do."

The result: Two Academy Awards and $48 million box office.

The Hunger Games (2009)

"That was a two-part decision. The first was to buy the book at a level that was significantly more than we usually pay for development. I read it in one night, though, and decided that we should go for it. The second part was to green-light the movie at a much higher budget — and risk — than we normally take. Strong presales eventually brought the risk back down to a more comfortable level.

The result: The 12th-highest-grossing movie of all time — $404 million domestic box office — and four films over the next five years.

GOOD SHOTS

Mad Men (2007)

"Just like with Crash, we passed on Mad Men in script form. And so it came back piloted by AMC. I saw the quality of it — the offbeat nature that felt like something network television wouldn't or couldn't do — so we went for it.

The result: Helped establish Lionsgate as a leader in supplying cable programming. Mad Men has won four straight best-drama Emmys.

Twilight (2008)

"We bought Summit Entertainment because it was a good strategic fit, and the opportunity to control two huge young-adult franchises was too good to pass up. Of course, we could have made a deal some years before at a much lower price. This was not my finest moment, but not a bad one in the end."

The result: The market capitalization of Lionsgate increased 70 percent in the six months after the acquisition.

MISS

Warrior (2011)

"I stuck my neck out on Warrior. I liked it so much, but it was a huge disappointment."

The result: An Academy Award nomination for Nick Nolte, but a financial failure.

TO BE DETERMINED

Anger Management (2012)

"This is another of those risky bets we like to take. Pretty much everybody in town said, 'Jon, you're out of your mind.' But we think we're in pretty good shape. We're very pleased with Charlie [Sheen] and the show, but the final word hasn’t been written yet."

Elisabeth Moch

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Tony Hsieh, Zappos.com

Headquarters: Las VegasNo. of Employees: 1,200Sales: $1 billion-plus (2009)*First Exposure to Work: Ran a photo business out of his bedroomSize of Office: 16 sq ft (cubicle)*last available data is for 2009, before acquisition by Amazon

In a little more than a decade, Tony Hsieh achieved more than most entrepreneurs could dream of doing in a lifetime. In 1998 he sold LinkExchange, an Internet advertising exchange he had cofounded, to Microsoft for $265 million. In 1999, he invested in Zappos.com, an online shoe retailer he originally thought was a dumb idea. Over the next ten years, he helped turn it into such a strong brand that in 2009 Amazon.com decided it was better to buy it than to compete against it. The price tag: $1.2 billion. And his 2010 book about corporate culture, Delivering Happiness, has sold more than 300,000 copies and made him what they call a management guru.

He's still only 38. Lately, Hsieh has switched to a wider-angle view. Zappos moved its headquarters to Henderson, Nevada, a suburb of Las Vegas, back in 2004. (He explains the decision simply: "It seems there weren't too many people in the Bay Area who thought of working in a call center as a career calling.") By 2010, though, the company had outgrown its headquarters, and Hsieh got to thinking about what makes for a thriving community, both inside and outside a company's walls. Inspired by Harvard economist Edward Glaeser's 2011 book, Triumph of the City, which explores the ways cities and humans interact and depend on one another, he eventually decided to move Zappos into Las Vegas's empty City Hall, in the long-overlooked Fremont neighborhood. The idea was classic Hsieh. In the same way he had succeeded in somehow making customer service fun, he was determined to flip traditional ideas of the company "campus" on their head. He cites statistics showing that when a city doubles in size, its productivity increases by 50 percent, but when companies double in size, their productivity actually drops. "So we're working on this weird hybrid approach to try and prevent that," he says. Population density is key. Zappos' space per employee — 120 square feet in Henderson versus a national average of 200 to 300 — will shrink to about 100.

He's also part of a team of investors pumping $350 million into revitalizing Las Vegas. But it's not all altruism and corporate advancement. Hsieh has a more practical reason: "Why else am I doing it? Because I live there. That's why."

Brad Swonetz/Redux

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Reggie Chandra, Rhythm Engineering

Ever go through a red light when there's no one around?When Reggie Chandra graduated from the University of Florida with a master's in transportation engineering (turns out that's a thing), he found his unusual vocation: improving quality of life for motorists. "Don't ask me how I knew," he says. "But I felt it deep down: It's a cardinal sin not to have traffic signals optimized." Get him going and he'll talk about how Rhythm's "adaptive traffic-control system," InSync — special cameras that read traffic at an intersection and reprogram in real time — cuts unnecessary stops and lowers fuel use by 20 percent. Then he gets to its higher purpose: saving lives. InSync is only in use at 750 of the 300,000 signals in the country, but it's only a matter of time before it becomes normal. According to AAA, accidents cost society about $164.2 billion a year — $28,500 per crash. InSync costs $25,000 per intersection. Eliminate two crashes and the system hasn't just benefited the people who avoided an accident, it saves all of us money. Does it work? Ask the Missouri Department of Transportation, which installed InSync along Route 291. Crashes along the corridor dropped by 17 percent. "How many mothers, fathers, and families have we saved from tragedy?" Chandra asks. "That could be someone in your family."

Elisabeth Moch

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Meredith Whitney, Meredith Whitney Advisory Group

When she was eight, Meredith Whitney bought up a bunch of other kids' paper routes to create a mini-empire. Then she'd have slumber parties on the weekends. Why? "Sunday is the heavy paper," she says. "I needed a workforce."

That's a bit of background for what happened on October 31, 2007, when the then-unknown analyst at Oppenheimer famously dropped a bomb on Citigroup — essentially pointing out that it needed money fast — that also, it has been argued, foretold the wider credit implosion about to shake the global economy to its roots. And just like that, as the fortunes of pretty much everyone in the world went into free fall — Citigroup CEO Chuck Prince lost his job a few days later — Whitney's began to rise. Michael Lewis said she was "the closest thing Wall Street has to an oracle."

By February 2009, Whitney was the most famous analyst on the planet. But she wasn't happy. Despite her fame and rising compensation, she felt lost in the system. "This is going to sound funny," she says, "but the game changer for me came in August 2008. I was on the cover of Fortune that month. And there was not so much as an e-mail about it, even some measly pizza party. At my firm, we have ice cream on every single birthday. I mean, how old are we? But you know, people love that. It reminds you that everybody matters."

Her firm is Meredith Whitney Advisory Group, founded in 2009. "At a certain point in your life, if you're not finding the right culture, you have to create it," she says. "You can only kvetch about not being happy for so long. If I was such a good analyst, why wasn't I being a better businessperson?"

Even if she's the boss, Whitney still leads by example — she is the primary fount of ideas in a firm built on selling them — but she also offers her staff a steep learning curve as well as the chance to feel the thrill of being right. They feel it often, like the

time the firm predicted nearly 80,000 impending layoffs on Wall Street in August 2010. Whitney encourages everyone who works for her to do as she has done: make the big call if that's what the research tells you to do. "We get so much grief for our calls," she says. "You can feel like you're going to be stuck in the pain cave until you see the other side. Then, before long, what seemed so controversial becomes consensus. But you know what? All the grief makes the final victory that much better."

Bleacher Everard

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Lanham Napier, Rackspace Hosting

Rackspace is a remarkable company that provides Webhosting and cloud-computing services — the behind-the-scenes business of the Internet — to 180,000 customers. When your product is ethereal, good customer service is essential. Rackspace's employees — known (to themselves) as Rackers — are encouraged to give "fanatical support." The highest honor they can receive is to have a straitjacket put on in front of their peers. (They actually do this.) Napier, their leader, is equally fanatical about keeping his own people happy. Just as Rackspace services a product you can't see, he looks for things the company shouldn't do. It's a simple but profound insight: Eliminate crap that annoys people and you'll make them more loyal than all the summer Fridays ever could. He calls it policy purge. For example:

No more cheap flights with crazy stopovers. "We'd save $200 but take six hours out of someone's day."

When employees apply for an internal job, an e-mail is no longer automatically sent to their manager.

"In tight times, we locked supply closets. If you wanted to write a thank-you note to a customer and your pen ran out of ink, you had to go to HR to get in the closet. What if you didn't? We saved nothing, and you didn't write the note. How stupid was that?"

Elisabeth Moch

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John Mackey, Whole Foods Market

In 1978, John Mackey opened a little vegetarian-food store in Austin. It turned into Whole Foods, which today operates more than 300 supermarkets staffed by 68,000 "team members." It has sales of more than $10 billion and a market value of $15.4 billion. And if you set aside the accusations of instigating gentrification, Whole Foods has been a net good thing. It's a symbol of the movement to think about what we eat and where it comes from. It has started necessary debates about carbon footprints and what "organic" means. You could argue that without Whole Foods, there wouldn't be a vegetable garden at the White House.

Mackey, who these days has a more cosmic vision of his role than you might expect — he talks about things like "self-actualization" and the "higher purpose" of a supermarket — nevertheless realizes that working in a supermarket might not always feel so cosmic to the people restocking the quinoa in aisle four. So he and his management team have made it policy to let employees try new ideas without waiting for senior executives to endorse them — or even know about them. "We're very decentralized," says Mackey. "We want individuals to feel like they can be creative at the team or store level."

A few years ago, employees at the store in Santa Rosa, California, decided — all by themselves — to build an enclosed taproom serving 16 artisan craft beers in the store. "The idea of a bar in a supermarket might sound stupid," says Mackey. "But in a couple of weeks, it was doing more business than the entire seafood department." When other employees saw the taproom on the company's intranet, the idea spread. At last count, the company had more than 50 in stores around the country.

Whole Foods employees might not have to answer to some faceless voice out of headquarters, but they do have to answer to their team, most of which — the produce team, the customer-service team, etc. — number just eight to ten people. And here's the genius part: Bonuses are paid out based on team, not individual, performance. Which means every store is broken down into several fluid and focused groups of people working toward a common goal.

When you read at the beginning of this story that employees were called team members, you didn't think that was bullshit, did you?

Peter Pugliese/August

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Mike Depatie, Kimpton Hotel & Restaurant Group

When Mike Depatie worked for Residence Inn, he helped grow it from 7 hotels to 100 before selling it to Marriott in 1987. After that, he cofounded Summerfield Suites, which in a decade grew to 37 hotels in 16 states. (Hyatt later bought the brand.) He then became CFO of La Quinta, which had a few hundred hotels at the time and now has more than 800. But Kimpton is his masterpiece, a chain that perfectly fits its time: friendly, cool, and upscale seeming, but at a sweet-spot price point somewhere between the Four Seasons and, well, La Quinta. A one-night stay at a Kimpton hotel revealed signs of Depatie's influence:

7:00 p.m. Check in to room 1902 at the Muse, 46th Street, New York, a half block from Times Square. It's a suite with a rate of $459, about 400 square feet and two rooms, bigger than you'd think for a boutique hotel. There's a plate of cheese and strawberries, a mirrored coffee table, and a kind of ersatz Dalí painting on the wall. The bust of a Roman goddess on the minibar is both confusing and perfect. There's a lot of blue cheese on the plate.

7:15 p.m. Poking around. There's no phone book in the room, a strangely noticeable detail. Turns out a few years ago a front-desk manager in Portland saw a pallet of phone books on a loading dock and asked, "Why do we still have phone books in every room? Does anybody ever use them?" All Kimptons now keep just one at the front desk. "Nobody has a corner on great ideas," says Depatie. That's not just his opinion: Kimpton scores well above the industry average on employee-satisfaction surveys.

8:35 p.m. Dinner at Nios, the hotel restaurant. It's classic Kimpton: There's a mellow crowd of tourists and midtown happy-hour workers buzzing around the slick bar/dining room. Two flat-screens show sports. There's smoked duck, "disco fries" (bacon, brown gravy, Parmesan, fantastic), charcuterie, flatbread pizzas, dynamite lamb shank, a burger on brioche — fancy enough to seem special but regular enough for people who like comfort food. A prix fixe dinner is $45; a glass of wine can run $17. The service: Like the staff throughout the hotel, they're there to help but they know when to stay out of the way.

9:50 p.m. Old-fashioneds at the bar. A trip to the bathroom reveals it to be one of those communal setups with six coed stalls surrounding one sink large enough for everybody.

10:20 p.m. Back in the room, a bowl of popcorn has appeared. A memorable, inexpensive gesture.

10:55 p.m. Sleep, after flipping through the 200-plus channels on the 37-inch TV.

9:15 a.m. At checkout, a chipper Kimpton employee stands at the front desk holding a Pomeranian. The woman says the Pomeranian is the director of pet relations.

Elisabeth Moch

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Kevin Plank, Under Armour

Kevin Plank started Under Armour, the athletic-apparel company, out of a row house in Georgetown in 1996. He sold $17,000 worth of product that year. Five years later, he sold $20 million. Five years after that, nearly $300 million. Five years after that, he topped $1 billion. In 2012, the company is on track to do $1.8 billion in sales. Plank had just 226 employees as recently as 2003; the company has more than 5,000 today.

A former college football player, Plank rolled into New York in June for the launch of Under Armour's new shoe, Spine, a product that sets him squarely on a collision course with Nike. "We have good and large competition," he says. "But we've shown that they can bleed. And if they can bleed, we can kill them." One way he made them bleed was by stealing Tom Brady as an athlete-endorser after his contract expired with Nike in the summer of 2010. Brady came to the New York event, and we asked him what's so inspiring about Kevin Plank.

ESQUIRE: Let's start with the important stuff. Does Gisele wear Under Armour? Tom Brady: Yeah, she's got some of their stuff.

ESQ: Good, good. Just working on a visual here.

TB: I prefer fewer clothes. If it's my choice, she's not wearing any clothes at all.

ESQ: So would you put Kevin Plank on your fantasy CEO team?

TB: Hell, yes. He could play just about wherever he wanted to play. Look at the guy. Whatever he's put his mind to in his life, he's accomplished. I think that's why people believe in him. It endears him to people.

ESQ: Does he want to win as badly as you do?

TB: We've been to the horse races a few times and I can tell you this: He doesn't like to lose.

ESQ: Under Armour is obviously high quality. But what about the company? What's impressive about the organization that Kevin has built?

TB: It's a lot of young people with a lot of energy. More important, maybe, is that there are a lot of people there who have come from other companies saying, "We know what's in the market, and we want to go in a different direction."

ESQ: Like making a commercial that debuted on Funny or Die in which we get to see you throw a salesperson to the ground?

TB: We took a chance on that. Kevin called me and said, "This is what we want to do. You may be lukewarm on it, but trust me, it's going to be great." I was lukewarm at the start of the conversation, but at the end, I said, "Hell, yes, we're going to do it." It was a great day. I laughed for six hours. Two hours of video were wasted on me laughing uncontrollably.

ESQ: Why'd you switch from Nike to Under Armour? Other than the equity stake and the huge piles of money that I'm sure he's throwing at you.

TB: It wasn't money. Some guys from my team had started to wear Under Armour. I met the rep — Ryan Kuehl, who used to play center for the Giants — and we hit it off. He said, "You have to give us a chance. Talk to Kevin." Kevin told me what his ambitions were, and I was sitting there going into my ninth year in the league. I was looking for a change, too.

ESQ: You're here in New York doing PR for the launch of Under Armour's new shoe, Spine. Do you feel welcome? Couldn't Kevin at least have had the launch in Boston?

TB: I don't come here as much anymore. I'm not as well received on the streets as I used to be.

Martin Schoeller/August

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Aaron Jagdfeld, Generac

It has become accepted as truth that manufacturing is no longer viable in the United States of America. This is not untrue, but it's not fact, either. There is a made-in-the-U. S. A. boomlet happening, fueled initially by national pride and small companies. But something else is going on: Making things here is getting cheaper. "We're actually 'reshoring' the making of certain components," says Aaron Jagdfeld, CEO since 2008 of Generac, which makes generators. Generac has grown 15 percent annually over the last ten years and has a 70 percent share of the home-generator market. A commitment to manufacturing and sourcing parts in the U. S. has kept 2,400 jobs in Wisconsin. And it's not just a quixotic act of patriotism. "Our focus is on a competitive cost structure in everything we do. This extends heavily to manufacturing," he says. By investing in facilities, he figures he'll profit in the long run. "This isn't your grandfather's factory. We've made big-ticket investments in automation and robotics — high-tech, cool stuff." Home-generator sales are rising, and Generac has established a market in Silicon Valley helping to power server farms. "This country was founded on making things we need. Young people are being pushed toward service industries, but there's a lot to be said for seeing what you made on a shelf at Home Depot," Jagdfeld says, a little quixotically, and with a hint of patriotism.